the JFKA according the Vince Salandria

Roger Odisio wrote:Below is somethin I posted today on EF that I thought should receive the perusal of people here.  It's about the politics of the JFKA.  It's a paean to the great Vince Salandria.

Your reference to Salandria, Paul, sent me scurrying to read again some of his stuff.

He was right about everything important, right from the beginning.

Kennedy's murder was organized and covered up by men in suits, who had worked closely with him in  his administration.  Who had been surprised and upset when JFK defeated Nixon in the '60 election. Whose anger grew when it became clear Kennedy, that wet behind the ears rich kid,  their putative boss, was not going to go along with their plans for the world.

There was no storming of the White House by troops to impose a military dictatorship, as, e.g.,  happened in Santiago ten years later.  The murder, we are told, was a "peaceful" transfer of power, a "peaceful" overturning of the '60 election.  Per Dylan's lyrics, they already had someone to take his place.

The rest of the decade the murderers and their allies went on a rampage to try to destroy the vestiges of an opposition to them on the Left in the US.  They intimidated politicians, and in fact the whole culture of Washington and the media that does its bidding--we're in charge now and there is nothing you can do about it, in Salandria's words-- that remains in place to this day. 

To get an idea of the change they wrought you need only watch JFK's commencement speech at A.U. in the Spring of '63, in which he laid out his plans for world peace--what kind of peace do we seek? a genuine peace, not a Pax Americana imposed by American weapons of war.  Precisely the opposite of what the murderers wanted. The speech was preceded by JFK's opening of back channel discussions with Krushchev and Castro, followed by the passage, against steep odds, of the  Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that Fall.  The  first steps toward his vision.  He was murdered shortly thereafter.

Compare that to what politicians do and say today about war and peace.

Nothing important is likely to change until this watershed turning point is clearly understood.  Salandria died in '19, but his insights live on. 

Salandria suffers from the same flaw as all other the "big picture is all we need" types. Big on rhetoric and finger pointing, low on evidence. In fact, isn't he on record as claiming forensic examination is a waste of time?

Or words to that effect. I know others of his ilk have said it since.

He was right though about it being a turning point, and that this was most likely one of the desired outcomes. He was also right that there was a pogrom to rid the world of progressives under cover of fighting communism. Where I would disagree is that it was the same people behind it every time. It is like pinning all unsolved murders on a single serial killer. The common threads in serial killers are (usually) the motivations and the psychology. 

I think Jack Ruby hinted at what was coming with future governments.

But the woman who made the Oxnard phone call spelled it it out mere minutes before the bullets flew.

"The President is going to die at 10:30 (local time in California). The [new] government takes over everything lock, stock and barrel."
www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62256#relPageId=171

This woman was using some form of "spell" to ensure the success of the operation. She certainly was not connected to anyone and was described as sounding like she was reciting a chant.  Other things she said indicate a connection to right wing groups with grievances against the courts. 

My personal belief is that the caller was Lucille Connell - known to be absent from Dallas at the time, middle-aged - which the caller was described as sounding - and according to Sylvia Odio, she was a member of the AMORC Rosicrucians (which practiced this mumbo jumbo trying to remotely affect people and events) and often visited their HQ - which was in California. Lastly, she was a bircher and would had a grudge against Kennedy over Cuba. 

She ticks every box.

In fact, if you want a common denominator, AMORC is the only one I can find.

Juan Roa Sierra - accused assassin of Jorge Gatian, 1948 -- a member of AMORC. Conducted the same neophyte rituals as Sirhan would 20 years later. These included self-hypnosis. 

Lucille Connell - a member of AMORC and associate of anti-castro types who may have been the Oxnard caller - and if so, was at the very least, privy to the plot.

Sirhan Sirhan - accused assassin of RFK - member of AMORC and probably acting under post-hypnotic suggestion. 

Hypnosis - 
Ruby hired hypnotists for his club. 
Connell practiced it.
Ferrie practiced it.

Salandria doesn't fit your big picture is all we need category, big on finger pointing and low on evidence. He is just the opposite.
 
I'm not going to recount it here, but you can hear and read about what he did to look into the murder, from the moment he heard about it, in the speech he gave at the COPA conference on the 35th anniversary of the event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkP5xtYT92k. (video)  https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/COPA1998VJS.html. (text)
 
A meticulous lawyer, he built a simple analytical framework to sift thru the voluminous information he and others uncovered.  What would an innocent, civilian controlled government do when confronted with each bit of that  information?  That is, if govt leaders were uninvolved in the murder, but interested in finding the truth of what happened.
 
He found that, time after time, in an unvarying pattern, the govt failed the test.  When mountains of evidence of a conspiracy emerged, the govt refused to act on that evidence.  However when data or even just a theory (the single bullet!), no matter how incredible, emerged that could possibly be interpreted as supporting a lone assassin claim, the govt "with greatest solemnity" declared such data proved its LN fairy tale.  Salandria concluded that only a criminally guilty govt, beholden to the killers and seeking to serve their interests, would accept one improbable conclusion after another while rejecting a long series of probable conclusions. They had turned probability theory on its head.
 
Oswald was never going to be allowed to even tell his story to a lawyer, let alone confront his accusers in court, but it's easy to see the beginnings of his defense as laid out by Salandria.  Which is why Oswald had to be killed and quickly. Salandria immediately smelled a rat that weekend and was off to investigate. 
 
Soon after the WR was issued Salandria wrote a critique of its claims in a local law daily, The Legal Intelligencer.  It was a "highly detailed analysis of the Report's conclusions about the trajectories and ballistics of the bullets which killed President Kennedy", Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, p. 15.  It was complex and technical and Fonzi didn't understand it at first.  But he grasped its sensational implications. The article was the first sustained criticism of the WC's conclusions about the forensic evidence.
 
No, Greg, Salandria never could have said forensic study was a waste of time.  He might have said at some point that *further* forensic study was unnecessary.  Such work can mainly offer a bunch of rabbit holes for curious dilettantes.
 
Salandria had read the WR and its 26 volumes of supporting material soon after it became available and concluded they didn't match; there were inconsistencies, even just in the stuff the govt released.  He suggested Fonzi read the material and Fonzi  found similar problems. This led to Fonzi, a writer for Philadelphia magazine, to interview Arlen Spector, the inventor of the single bullet theory for the WC.
 
Fonzi was appalled.  Spector couldn't answer even basic questions about his theory. That led Fonzi down a path similar to Salandria culminating in his work on the House Committee on Assassinations, which produced The Last Investigation, exposing that farce.
 
In the December 1971 edition of "Computers and Automation"(!) Salandria published "A Model for Explanation" of the JFKA, going thru a list of possible perps.  Including the aftermath:  what the murder had done to US society. While lamenting the already 8 years of dithering and the costs of that delay  
 
Of course the aftermath of murders, overthrown govts and war was not carried out by the same people that did the JFKA. Allen Dulles died in 1969.  But he had developed an institutional perspective, call it an ideology if you want, that has endured as govt policy, with modifications, to this day.  Back in his day it was, you are either with us or with the Soviets against us.  And if you are against us, nation or an individual like JFK, beware. 
 
With the collapse of the Soviet Union as the main competitor in the early 1990s, a "rules based order" with the US, as the "exceptional nation" making the rules, became the new policy.   And is now crumbling before our eyes.  Russia, China, and the rest of BRICS, with others countries now joining, are developing a multipolar world in which no nation by itself gets to impose its will on others.
 
One can see an opening in this for a reexamination of what the US's behavior since WWII has wrought, and the role that the seizure of power from the JFKA by the "deep state" has played in the damage.
 
Btw, the very premise of this site is a big picture claim.  Oswald didn't do it.  That leads naturally (for me) to: then who did and why and what does it have to do with the predicament we find ourselves in today. What does the JFKA have to do with the rise and fall of the post WWII US empire.

Roger, from the Spartacus bio of Salandria:

Vincent Salandria was born in Philadelphia in 1926. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1951 he became a lawyer. A pacifist, Salandria has a long record of campaigning for civil rights. As a lawyer he has specialized in labour law and civil liberties issues.

A member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Salandria was one of the first people to criticize the Warren Commission Report. In 1964 he published an article in the Legal Intelligencer where he argued that the wounds of President John Kennedy suggested he had not been killed by a lone gunman.

Over the next few years Salandria argued that Kennedy had been assassinated by "the national security state" because he was trying to bring an end to the Cold War. He also rejected the idea that the assassination was organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Mafia, the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro or Lyndon B. Johnson.

I wouldn't disagree with that last paragraph too much. Except maybe arguing the toss over what and who represents the National Security State.

It is the next bit of the bio that I have a problem with

In 1975 Salandria told Gaeton Fonzi: "I'm afraid we were misled. All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort microanalyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: 'We are in control and no one - not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official - no one can do anything about it.' It was a message to the people that their Government was powerless."

So what he is saying and what his would-be heirs also procliam is "we don't need no steenkin' evidence. Everyone can see it was a conspiracy!

Charles Drago is a good example as a wannabe heir, proclaiming that anyone who doesn't admit there was a conspiracy is either cognitively impaired and/or complicit in the crime.

It's akin to you looking at a cloud and seeing an elephant and blasting anyone who says the elephant eludes them.


Moreover, it takes us nowhere. Are you going to demand that the case be reopened just because you think a conspiracy was obvious? Of course not. 

I am a firm believer that the devil is in the detail. I suspect people like Drago hate such deep dives into evidence because they just lack the skills for it themselves. They have no sharp vision. All they see is the big picture. Abd even then, they only see it in bas relief, barely discernable from the chaos in their heads.  

Salandria was no doubt a nice guy and made a decent contribution. But those 1975 comments to Fonzi opened the floodgates for idiots with no fuckin idea, to come in and make up whatever scenraio suits then and their mindset or political persuasion, without the need to worry about little things like evidence. Easier just to canibalize a bunch of fuck-up authors and create my own Frankenstein Monster. These people also tend to be the loudest and have the huckster knack for selling bullshit.

I think it was Fonzi who popularized Veciana and his claims about Maurice Bishop. Turned out to be quite a rabbit hole.

I've tried to explain how quickly and thoroughly--even used the word meticulous--Salandria was in gathering evidence and making sense out of it.  Scoured the WR, compared it to the 26 volumes supposedly underlying the report.  Multiple trips to Dallas soon after the murder. Formed discussion groups with other researchers.
 
He was the prime purveyor of that crucial bit of evidence leading him toward what was always his central concern--who did it and why.  That of course was the message sent from the White House Situation Room, run at the time by Bundy, to the plane coming back from Dallas.  We have already solved the crime, it said.   A gunman acting alone. There was no conspiracy.
 
To which he added his interpretation of what these officials were being told:  no matter what you think you saw in Dallas, don't interfere.  It was a message that quickly pervaded and intimidated all of Washington, and was magnified by the media throughout the country,  
 
In short, Salandria can't be accused of not caring about evidence.  He never said everyone can see there was a conspiracy by those at the highest levels of government.  He said he could see that.  It was obvious to him based on everything he had learned and he tried to help others to see it too.
 
Nor can he be blamed for all those who came after him and reached a similar conclusion based on preconceived notions or beliefs, without recourse to the evidence.
 
No more than you, Greg, can be blamed for the hordes of "researchers" who take your preference for looking at the details (the devil is in the details) as an excuse to mindlessly investigate any detail that tickles their fancy, regardless whether it goes anywhere or has any relation to the central question.  A bunch of mindless puzzle solvers. 
 
Btw, if Oswald didn't do it, there must have been a conspiracy of some sort.  Even if it was only to protect the identity of who did it. 
 
Which brings me to a question. If you believe Oswald didn't do it, was simply a patsy, why have you spent so much of your time detailing and understanding his life? 

I have said before I didn't think a reexamination of the case was likely until Oswald's innocence was proven to the satisfaction of many.  But given the positive attention Bobby Jr has so far brought to the case, shouting conspiracy theorist is becoming less effective, I may have to modify that.
 
What is your motivation for focusing on Oswald?